Activists Flood Election Offices With Challenges - The New York Times

[ificandream]

From The New York Times
By Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon
Sept. 28, 2022

Activists driven by false theories about election fraud are working to toss out tens of thousands of voter registrations and ballots in battleground states, part of a loosely coordinated campaign that is sowing distrust and threatening further turmoil as election officials prepare for the November midterms.

Groups in Georgia have challenged at least 65,000 voter registrations across eight counties, claiming to have evidence that voters’ addresses were incorrect. In Michigan, an activist group tried to challenge 22,000 ballots from voters who had requested absentee ballots for the state’s August primary. And in Texas, residents sent in 116 affidavits challenging the eligibility of more than 6,000 voters in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest county.

The recent wave of challenges have been filed by right-wing activists who believe conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They claim to be using state laws that allow people to question whether a voter is eligible. But so far, the vast majority of the complaints have been rejected, in many cases because election officials found the challenges were filed incorrectly, rife with bad information or based on flawed data analysis.

Republican-aligned groups have long pushed to aggressively cull the voter rolls, claiming that inaccurate registrations can lead to voter fraud — although examples of such fraud are exceptionally rare. Voting rights groups say the greater concern is inadvertently purging an eligible voter from the rolls.

The new tactic of flooding offices with challenges escalates that debate — and weaponizes the process. Sorting through the piles of petitions is costly and time-consuming, increasing the chances that overburdened election officials could make mistakes that could disenfranchise voters. And while election officials say they’re confident in their procedures, they worry about the toll on trust in elections. The challenge process, as used by election deniers, has become another platform for spreading doubt about the security of elections.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html?searchResultPosition=1

[Dentbla]

1. desperate

desperate people do desperate things...especially Repubs.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. I don't think we're playing the right game here

We need to show how these activists are corrupting elections instead of allowing them to have the high ground.

[lambchopp59]

3. "We believe there were election irregularities."

"So we'll cause election irregularities."